Failure to adhere to a prescribed medication-dosage regimen is a dangerous and ubiquitous problem. Missing a prescribed dosage of certain medications, such as blood-pressure medicine, may result in significant harm and even death. Accidental overdose of prescription medication often causes negative effects that are even more dangerous and immediate than missing a prescribed dosage.
According to the National Council on Patient Information, up to 60% of all prescribed medication is taken incorrectly. Physicians take only 75% of prescribed pills correctly. Non-compliance costs more than $300 billion a year in the USA, accounts for 13% of all hospital admissions, and causes 150,000 deaths.
In addition to prescribed medication, there are vitamins and other supplements that do not require a prescription from a doctor and that are also recommended for use according to a regular schedule. Failure to adhere to a recommended schedule may lessen the effectiveness of the vitamins and other supplements and may exposes a consumer to the risk of overdose. Pills prescribed by veterinarians for the care of animals are associated with similar risks and consequences when not used according to a prescribed dosing schedule.
Many different medicine dispensers and medicine-dispensing regimes have been proposed and developed in order to assist consumers in self-administration of drugs, vitamins, and other consumables. However, the fact that, according to current statistics, non-compliance with administration schedules continues to be a serious problem and represents a significant financial burden to consumers as well as to society, as a whole, indicates that the many proposed and currently-available regimes and dispensers have not effectively addressed problems associated with self-administration of pills by consumers.
Many pills are currently distributed in threaded bottles. Most often, these threaded bottles are blow-molded. Unlike injection molded bottles, a blow-molded bottle can be readily manufactured to have a neck portion smaller in diameter than the diameter of the main portion of the bottle. Blow-molded bottles can be manufactured to have different volumes, shapes, and sizes that share a commonly sized neck and thus a commonly sized cap. Blow-molded, threaded bottles are mass-produced at low cost. A significant portion of existing manufacturing facilities and automated dispensing systems are configured to produce and use threaded bottles.